XPages are a tough nut to crack. Thanks to IBM's apparent disinterest in people using their software (which is a big topic in itself), it's an uphill battle to figure out what to do with them. For simple applications, they're overkill - loading a Java framework stack that seems to go on for miles has some noticeable performance penalties. But for larger applications, how are you supposed to write them? The main tutorials I've run across usually involve replicating basic form/view functionality or porting an example Notes application over. That's great, but I already know how to make apps with forms and views.

A couple sources, such as the excellent Mindoo blog and the well-produced Notes in 9 give hints at the "other" way to do XPages development, the way involving pure Java classes and scoped beans. From what I've gathered in my development, this is the "Right" way to do it, but, unfortunately, those blog posts and videos are about the extent of what I've found. I imagine that I could learn more if I hired consultants or attended LUGs in various parts of the world, but those seem like pretty ridiculous solutions to the problem.

Since XPages are an application of JSF, I could run off in that direction, but there are severe problems with that plan, not the least of which is that the XPage tag library is very distinct from other JSF applications and so reading any of those books would be analogous to learning MFC by reading a book about Qt. Same language and same general concepts, sure, but it's not the same environment.

This ambiguity manifests in practical problems. I'm writing a forum at the moment, and I'm wondering what the best way to do it is. On a topic page, for example, I have a topic ID and I want to display a paginated view of the posts in that topic. The straightforward and functional way to do it is to use a <xp:dominoView/> data source with a categoryFilter and feed that to a <xp:repeat/> control. That works and initially is pretty clean - showing data from a view is easy. But then I want to show the author's preferred alias instead of their username, so I put in a custom control with code to look that up. Oh, and some code to determine and show the author's current avatar image. And some code to determine if the current user can edit or delete the post. And some code to look for previous versions of the post to show an edit history. And some code to add or remove the topic from the list of the user's favorite topics. And so on and so on.

None of that code is particularly crazy, and I've moved a lot of it into custom controls to keep it nice and clean, but, at this point, I've got all kinds of business logic performing actions and converting <xp:dominoView>s and <xp:dominoDocument/>s into topic lists and posts. The actual XPage itself is supposed to be the View part of a MVC setup, right? Instead, now I have this View/Controller hybrid with a dash of Model when I have to make a secondary data source to get the rich text of the post. That can't be right. Instead, I should probably write some Java classes called Topic, Post, and Author and get all that crap out of the XPage.

And therein lies the problem. I started clean with a fancy new framework, but I've been largely left to my own devices when it comes to figuring out how to use it. Plus, I've not even totally convinced that Java-ifying everything is actually the right way. Once I step away from the pre-provided Data Sources, I'm suddenly on the hook for handling efficient pagination and cacheing myself, plus "smaller" things like getting the rich text data out of the documents and to the web browser. Should I try to read the MIME entity in Java? Should I punt and provide a .getDocument() method on the Post to let the <xp:dominoDocument/> source do the work? It's not clear. Should I read in all of the pertinent data from the document as soon as I instantiate a Post, or should I leave the Document object sitting around and only pull it in on-demand? I guess I'll have to try both and find out if one is much slower.

Eventually, I expect to find a smooth way of accomplishing everything I want to do and all this will be like second nature. But that "eventually" is quite a while, and a far cry from more opinionated software like Rails (which is written in a better language, to boot). Maybe Mastering XPages will help, but it seems I'll have to content myself with muddling through until at least the end of January.